World War is the second worst activity of mankind, the worst being acquiescence in slavery.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
On the Right
Category Archives: Politics
Cognitive dissonance obliviousness
I don’t understand how they can say this without causing their head to explode:
Currie has been a strong advocate for civil liberties and women’s rights in the state legislature. She also has pushed for major reforms in the state’s property tax-reliant funding of public schools. Additionally, she’s been a leading advocate for gun control and an opponent of the death penalty.
[Emphasis added. — Joe]
It makes just as much sense as if the following occurred:
- NAACP advocated white supremacy
-
ADL advocated children joining Hitler youth groups
-
HRC advocated stronger sodomy laws
Why doesn’t the press laugh them them all the way to the funny farm?
Quote of the day–Ann Landers
No one has the right to destroy another person’s belief by demanding empirical evidence.
Ann Landers
Nationally syndicated advice columnist and Director of Handgun Control, Inc.
[I would claim than in matters that adversely affect other people one has the obligation to demand empirical evidence. But so many moonbats agree with Landers philosophy that it is rather depressing at times. — Joe]
Microsofties to the rescue
I remember attending a party once where most people did not know who I was and where I worked at the time (a contractor for Microsoft). I was just sort of hanging out and listening (that’s really active for me, often I just find a place to take a nap if I have to go to a party). This woman started talking about how selfish rich people are and how they should be made to be more generous. “So”, I asked, “What is your source of data for the claim that rich people are selfish?” I know, that was a below the belt punch on a defenseless communist as per the following:
No one has the right to destroy another person’s belief by demanding empirical evidence.
Ann Landers, nationally syndicated advice columnist and Director of Handgun Control, Inc.
But being the scientist/engineer and generally socially clueless type I asked anyway. The response was, “Do you have any evidence they are not?” That was actually a fairly decent response–had I not been working at Microsoft for several years and knew many multi-millionaires. Other people could have mentioned numerous famous foundations and philanthropists but I chose to give examples I had witnessed. I told of going to Denny’s in Bellevue, a short distance from Microsoft, with other people form Microsoft for coffee and desert. We hung around for an hour or two talking, sipping our drinks, and nibbling on our pies and cakes. As we left we tossed money on the table to cover our bill and a tip. There was probably six or seven people but the excess money for the tip was over $60. No one cared if they got change for the $20 they tossed on the table. That was common whenever I went out for meals with “rich people” from Microsoft–a $20 bill WAS change to them. I further told the clueless commie that the head of my favorite charity (I didn’t tell her SAF was my favorite at the time) came in to talk to a club I belonged to at Microsoft (the Microsoft Gun Club) and told us that every year the largest single donation they received was from Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft matches employee donations dollar for dollar to qualified 501(C)(3) organizations if you do the proper paperwork. Those “rich selfish Microsoft employees” and their greedy corporation donations made a huge difference to that charitable organization. In my several years of being around “rich people” I didn’t know a single person I would have considered selfish. I even knew one manager who offered to pay for one of his employee’s sex change operation out of his own pocket (in return he wanted the testicles in a jar to put on his desk–but that’s another story I didn’t tell her). In short, I had a very limited sample of probably 50 to 100 people in one geographical location at one company, but every bit of data I had contradicted her claim. She didn’t have anything to offer and we changed subject–I wasn’t so clueless that I pushed the issue with her.
Ry, over at Mindless Bit Spew, is currently working at Microsoft and today reports on the activities of just one Microsoft private pilot who got time off from work to help with Katrina relief efforts. Here is the first paragraph of his story published in a newsgroup internal to Microsoft:
Watching the destruction of Hurricane Katrina & the effect it was having on people’s lives, I wanted to help somehow. Our neighborhood organized a lunch, and we raised $3000 in just a few hours via donations by selling sandwiches to people simply driving buy. The company that I work at building a game called Flight Simulator, Microsoft Corporation, matched the donation. Wow, I was very impressed how people rallied and came together to support individuals thousands of miles away. Although I thought this effort on my neighborhoods part was awesome, I wanted to contribute more directly to the relief effort. I searched online for a way to contribute my airplane to fly people & supplies to the disaster stricken area.
People that bash capitalism need some exposure to reality. Personally I know of no better place than what you see at Microsoft. They’ve done some things wrong but the scales are so heavily weighted on the positive side you have to be actively avoiding reality to claim socialism/communism/fascism or whatever government scheme you might imagine is a “better way”.
Quote of the day–Hollander & Wilson
It would appear that socialism really works under some circumstances. Karl Marx just had the wrong species.
Hollander & Wilson
Journey to the Ants (1994)
You would think they would know better
Via a pointer from Mindless Bit Spew. The Dutch are planning to open a “cradle to grave” electronic file on every child.
AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – The Dutch government plans to open an electronic file on every child at birth as a tool to spot and protect the troubled kids of the future.
Beginning Jan. 1, 2007, all citizens will be tracked from cradle to grave in a single database — including health, education, family and police records — the health ministry said Tuesday.
As a privacy safeguard, no single person or agency will be able to access all contents of a file. But organizations can raise “red flags” in the dossier to caution other agencies about problems, ministry spokesman Jan Brouwer said.
The intention is to protect troubled children, Brouwer said. Until now, schools and police have been unable to communicate with each other about truancy records and criminality, which are often linked.
“Child protection services will say, ‘Hey, there’s a warning flag from the police. There’s another one from school. There’s another one from the doctor,” Brouwer said. “Something must be going on and it’s time to call the parents in for a meeting.”
Every child will get a Citizens Service Number, making it easier to keep track of children with problems even when their families move, said Secretary of Health Clemence Ross.
“Safety, guidance, education and supervision are incredibly important for the development of children,” Ross said.
All Dutch births are currently registered with local authorities.
Doesn’t it always seem to be “for the children”? It has often been said the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I claim it is paved with the skulls of the tens of millions of people, including children, who died at the hands of their own governments intent on doing good at any cost.
It must be the Dutch forgot about the little incident back in the late ’30s and ’40s when those type of records were found to be quite useful–when tracking down all the people with “Jewish blood”. And how is that “privacy safeguard” enforced? Is there anything that can’t be changed by a simple act of the lawmakers? As I said in the context of a U.S. Universal Biometric Identification the safeguards that I would require to be put in place in order to believe the contents of the database would not abused would cause the most enthusiastic Auschwitz guard to cringe at my creativity in punishment methods, violate numerous protections of the Bill of Rights, and probably inspire several additions to it. And, I now add, enforceable by any person anywhere on the planet that has a reasonable suspicion there was abuse of that database.
Quote of the day–Bertrand Russell
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more often likely to be foolish than sensible.
Bertrand Russell
Quote of the day–Jeff Cooper
More than two thousand years ago Aristotle opined that most of the human race has essentially the soul of a slave. A recent Associated Press poll recorded that fifty-four percent of those questioned seemed willing to trade liberty for security. The sad fact is that one cannot trade the one for the other. You can surrender your liberty, but what you get in turn is never a significant increase in your security. There are those in Israel who feel that they would like to trade “land for peace.” That will not work either.
Jeff Cooper
From Jeff Cooper’s Commentaries
Vol. 3, No. 7
16 May 1995
Quote of the day–James Bovard
Gun bans don’t ban guns; rather, they only ban citizens from legally defending themselves with guns.
James Bovard
Lost Rights
ISBN 0-312-12333-7
Copyright 1994, 1995
Does this give you a clue?
Israeli turned over the land they captured in ’67. The dust hadn’t even settled from their exit when:
Palestinians surged triumphantly into demolished Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip early today, torching empty synagogues and firing shots into the air, as the last Israeli soldiers withdrew after 38 years of occupation.
I can see some really hostility expressed by making the synagogues into barns, or a manure storage storage facility but even that would be considerably over the top in my “book”–and I’m an atheist. Burning them to the ground is stupid, completely irrational, or an expression of blinding hatred. As Clayton Cramer said in his post:
Can you imagine the upset if Israelis had torched mosques in the Occupied Terroritories? There is something unnerving about this–rather like Krystallnacht translated into Arabic.
I’m guessing it’s blind hatred.
In another article — regarding the spread of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases:
Al-Sayyid: Most certainly. The entire world, from the US to the most distant country, acknowledges that if they had stoned the fornicators, and prevented abomination, things would have been much better.
No wonder they call it “The Religion of Peace.” Anyone that disagrees with their view of morality is killed and things are peaceful again.
They give us no acceptable options but to destroy their extremist culture.
Money spent on security
As I’ve posted before I think most of the money the government spends on “security” is a stupid waste and it is a threat to our freedom (for example see Universal ID Card Fatal Flaws and Stop Intrusive Airport Screenings). Schneier, my security expert hero, got another editorial published where he talks about the waste portion of things:
Funding security based on movie plots looks good on television, and gets people reelected. But there are millions of possible scenarios, and we’re going to guess wrong. The billions spent defending airlines are wasted if the terrorists bomb crowded shopping malls instead.
And he tells us where the money should be spent:
Our nation needs to spend its homeland security dollars on two things: intelligence-gathering and emergency response. These two things will help us regardless of what the terrorists are plotting, and the second helps both against terrorist attacks and national disasters.
…
Money spent on emergency response makes us safer, regardless of what the next disaster is, whether terrorist-made or natural.
This includes good communications on the ground, good coordination up the command chain, and resources — people and supplies — that can be quickly deployed wherever they’re needed.
Similarly, money spent on intelligence-gathering makes us safer, regardless of what the next disaster is. Against terrorism, that includes the NSA and the CIA. Against natural disasters, that includes the National Weather Service and the National Earthquake Information Center.
The problem is politicians are very short-sighted. Far-sighted politicians have a near zero chance of getting elected. Can you imagine someone running for Governor of Louisiana on a platform of shutting down New Orleans and letting the Mississippi reroute itself 100+ miles to the west? It’s probably the right thing to do and would have saved thousands of lives. If our Federal government had been limited to it’s proper duties as defined in the Constitution economics would have forced them to “do the right” thing anyway. But the Feds ended up spending billions on the levees and flood control to fight a battle that we will cannot win. The question is how many times will the people of New Orleans lose this battle before the U.S. taxpayers say, “It’s time to face reality. Pack your things and leave.”
See also:
New Orleans may have to face reality
Another shot at New Orleans
Now do you believe me?
New Orleans was most vulnerable major city to hurricanes
More levee info
Quote of the day–Mohandas K. Gandhi
An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
(1869-1948), Indian political and spiritual leader.
Non-Violence in Peace and War, vol. 2, ch. 150 (1949).
Quote of the day–Doug Huffman
We have a legal system, not a “justice” system.
Doug Huffman
September 8, 2005 9:27 PM
[Lots of other people have said this too. I am unable to determine the originator of the phrase. — Joe]
Gay marriage in California
I’m all in favor of gay’s being allowed to marry. I think marriage is a great institution and people that are willing to make that sort of commitment should not be prohibited from getting hitched to the partner of their choice. California legislators have passed a bill removing restrictions on same sex marriages. Governor Schwarzenegger says he is going to veto it. From the LA Times via Yahoo News:
… announced through an aide Wednesday that he would veto the measure “out of respect for the will of the people.”
In a careful statement, Schwarzenegger press secretary Margita Thompson invoked the voter approval in March 2000 of Proposition 22, which said: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
I have mixed feelings on Arnie’s action. I have a pretty strong tendency to agree with his reasoning, especially since Proposition 22 passed with 61% of the vote. But what if Proposition 22 had said blacks/Jews/whatever were not allowed to marry outside their groups? Or 61% voted to re-institute slavery? Is the only valid solution to go through the courts seeking to remedy the injustice or convince the population at large it’s a bad decision? It’s a tough call for me. I think the bottom line is that denying someone marriage isn’t clearly (although I think a case can be made for it) infringing a fundamental right like the right to freedom (non-slavery), freedom of speech, and the right to keep and arms. Therefore I have to conclude Arnie made the right decision–especially when it provokes the moon-bats into statements like this:
“The only reason that he could be doing this is that he is pandering to the far right,” said Assemblyman Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), the measure’s author.
61% of the voters were against same-sex marriage, therefore Assemblyman Leno must think 61% of California voters are “far right”. Someone should give him his anti-psychotic meds as they lead him away to the funny farm.
More of the same on the Canadian gun registry
More delays and people ignoring this waste of time and money–but this time there’s talk of the police ignoring it:
In what has become a familiar refrain, the Canada Firearms Centre has once again quietly put off several gun regulations that were supposed to take effect this month.
Among the measures delayed until next year is a provision to have police forces across Canada register all their weapons – including seized guns – with the federal agency. New rules governing gun shows have been deferred until November 2006, while regulations that would force gun-makers to identify all firearms with internationally recognized markings won’t come into force until the end of 2007.
The provisions were initially supposed to take effect last January, but were put off to Sept. 1. Now they’ve been deferred again.
A spokesman for Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan said the deferral is both to “ensure compliance and be responsive to the feedback” on the regulations from the public.
…
The latest delays indicate there are still many kinks in the system, said Conservative MP Peter MacKay.
“It’s another example of the ineffective, overly bureaucratic nightmare that is the gun registry,” MacKay said from Halifax.
“The government continues with this simultaneous face-saving, rear-end-covering exercise of trying to justify a very cumbersome, useless system.”
MacKay, a former Crown prosecutor, insisted the government backed off because police forces would have ignored the registration demand.
“They’ve got far more important things to do.”
The registry has become an easy target. The Liberals promised it would cost taxpayers just $2 million when they introduced it in 1995. But the price has skyrocketed past $1 billion and been the subject of scathing criticism from the federal auditor general.
Opponents claim tens of thousands of guns remain unregistered, and say the system punishes law-abiding farmers and sport hunters while doing nothing to deter illegal weapons from getting into the hands of criminals.
It’s a losing issue. They should salvage the computers, lay off all the Canada Firearms Centre workers, and either spend the money saved on police and/or prisons or let the people use it to buy a good handgun and training to defend themselves and their families with. Registration of firearms and their owners is no more effective in reducing crime and no less abhorrent than registering Jews/blacks/homosexuals/etc.
Making ourselves secure from movie plots
As usual Bruce Schneier articulates the straight scoop on security issues well. In this article he also takes a swipe at the politicians with the “make people feel good” mindset. From Wired News:
Sometimes it seems like the people in charge of homeland security spend too much time watching action movies. They defend against specific movie plots instead of against the broad threats of terrorism.
…
The problem with movie plot security is that it only works if we guess right. If we spend billions defending our subways, and the terrorists bomb a bus, we’ve wasted our money. To be sure, defending the subways makes commuting safer. But focusing on subways also has the effect of shifting attacks toward less-defended targets, and the result is that we’re no safer overall.
Terrorists don’t care if they blow up subways, buses, stadiums, theaters, restaurants, nightclubs, schools, churches, crowded markets or busy intersections. Reasonable arguments can be made that some targets are more attractive than others: airplanes because a small bomb can result in the death of everyone aboard, monuments because of their national significance, national events because of television coverage, and transportation because most people commute daily. But the United States is a big country; we can’t defend everything.
One problem is that our nation’s leaders are giving us what we want. Party affiliation notwithstanding, appearing tough on terrorism is important. Voting for missile defense makes for better campaigning than increasing intelligence funding. Elected officials want to do something visible, even if it turns out to be ineffective.
Quote of the day–James Bovard
The creeping political repeal of the right to self-defense is a huge decrease in the modern American’s liberty because the government has completely failed to fill the void. The government has stripped millions of people of their right to own weapons–yet generally left them free to be robbed, raped, and murdered. Gun bans are one of the best cases of laws that corner private citizens–forcing them either to put themselves into danger or to be a lawbreaker.
James Bovard
Lost Rights
ISBN 0-312-12333-7
Copyright 1994, 1995
Quote of the day–Henry David Thoreau
As to conforming outwardly, and living your own life inwardly, I have not a very high opinion of that course.
Henry David Thoreau
(1817-1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist.
Journals (1906), entry in 1850.
As if this is supposed to make sense
From The Globe and Mail in Toronto:
Ontario to blitz gun shops
In an effort to stem a recent rash of gun violence in Toronto, the Ontario government announced it will begin conducting sweeps of gun shops to help reduce the number of illegal guns in the city.
“[We want] to ensure that we have safe standards in place,” said the province’s Attorney-General Michael Bryant at a press conference in Toronto Thursday.
However, Mr. Bryant said the sweep will be limited to businesses and not individual homes, as that is the purview of the federal government and the gun registry.
They are doing sweeps of the gun shops to reduce the number of illegal guns? How about they “blitz” automobile dealerships to reduce the number of illegal cars on the roads? Or tweaking one of my favorites, conduct raids on cosmetic stores to “stem the recent rash of prostitution” on the streets?
Give it up guys, you spent $2 Billion dollars on a failed gun registration system, and still you can’t answer just this one question in the affirmative. Harassing the gun store owners isn’t going to be productive either.
They caught him
A couple weeks ago I posted about a guy staying out in woods and damaging logging equipment. The suspect is in the local county jail now. I’m glad no one got hurt as it seemed likely at the time. The suspect said he wanted to kill some cops. I had done some brainstorming with my brother about this and hadn’t come up with the solution they used although one would have thought that two electrical engineers would have been the first to thing of it. From the Lewiston Morning Tribune:
Sheriff reels in Weippe suspect
By DAVID JOHNSON
of the Tribune“He took the bait.”
That’s how Clearwater County Sheriff Alan Hengen Tuesday described the early morning arrest of 34-year-old David Pruss in the woods about one and a half miles northwest of Weippe.
“We knew he liked coffee.”
Pruss, who’d been wanted for the better part of three months on a warrant for alleged malicious destruction of property and burglary, remained in the county jail at Orofino Tuesday night and could face additional charges, Hengen said.
The sheriff and his deputies had been chasing a suspect since early June who allegedly had shot up some logging equipment, broken into a number of cabins and buildings and otherwise eluded authorities.
Hengen said deputies learned that the suspect seemed to always steal coffee when he had a chance. So they placed a “signaling unit” in the bottom of a plastic can of coffee, and put the can in a building where the suspect had previously entered several times.
“We tried a lot of things, but that one worked,” Hengen said. Within a week, the can of coffee was gone. Homing in on the signal from the coffee can, deputies were able to triangulate an approximate location, said Hengen, and Tuesday’s predawn raid was organized. Two dog teams and 17 enforcement officers entered the forested area and closed in on the location, the sheriff said. They found a hut made of poles that were tied together and covered with pine boughs.
“We got him while he was sleeping,” Hengen said. He said Pruss at first refused to come out of the hut and deputies used pepper spray. According to a press release from the sheriff’s office, Pruss was “believed to have been reaching” for a Mac-90 assault rifle that was found underneath him. Hengen said a .357-caliber magnum revolver also was found.
“He had like a tent in there,” Hengen said of the hut, which he described as about 6-feet square.
Deputies also found military and SWAT-type clothing, said Hengen, similar to clothing worn by a suspect that appears in a surveillance camera photo taken more than a month ago where logging equipment had been shot up. According to the press release, other items allegedly taken from the logging site were found where Pruss was arrested.
Pruss, formerly of Utah and Montana, came to Weippe about a year ago, according to residents in town. Authorities said he is thought to have ties to fringe militia groups. Hengen said earlier this month that he feared the suspect they were seeking was trying to lure his deputies into an ambush. According to the news release, Pruss “is believed to have told others his intent was to damage public infrastructure in order to lure Clearwater County Sheriff’s Deputies into the woods for the purpose of picking them off.”
Since the first week in June, Hengen’s department had been investigating several burglaries and reports of property being destroyed. There had been damage to power transformers, phone pedestals, a small hydroelectric plant and the logging equipment, according to the news release. Several businesses and residences also had been burglarized, authorities said.
Total damage is estimated to have exceeded $100,000, Hengen said.
Weippe residents earlier this month voiced mixed thoughts about the suspect, some saying he was harmless and others expressing disgust that someone was shooting up logging equipment. Many people said they were locking their doors for the first time.
Hengen said the destruction of property seemed to trail off over the past few weeks and he thinks the suspect was “just trying to wait us out.” Most of the logging equipment that had been damaged belonged to Kenneth Miller, whose equipment and vehicles had been located at a site in the Winters Creek area near Weippe.
In addition to sheriff deputies, Hengen said U.S. Forest Service personnel and members of Clearwater County Search and Rescue participated in numerous searches for the suspect.
Authorities ask that anyone finding more hut-like structures in the woods around Weippe call the sheriff’s office and stay away from the structures. The same goes for any equipment, clothing or other stored items that might be found.